ISLAMABAD: Tomorrow will be the last day for 10 million SIMs owners for biometric verification of their SIMs. If they fail they will lose their connections consequently.
So far, 16.690 million SIMs have already been blocked by the cellular operators as subscribers disowned these SIMs during the ongoing verification exercise. In case of non verification of the additional 10 million SIMs till tomorrow (Sunday) night, the number of all the blocked SIMs may touch over 26 million during the exercise of implementing the National Action Plan (NAP).
Ruling out the possibility of any extension in deadline under the NAP, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has now directed the cellular operators to submit their undertaking on exact numbers of re-verification of SIMs through BVS and blocked SIMs in details on April 13.
The re-verification exercise through the BVS slowed down during the second phase, said the sources in cellular operators but opined that it might get pace in the last two days. “All unverified SIMs will be blocked after 12:00pm on Sunday night and there is no possibility of extending the deadline even by a minute,” PTA’s Member Enforcement Abdul Samad confirmed while talking to The News here on Friday.
He said that the cellular operators had so far re-verified 77,167,225 SIMs through BVS on verified 60,496,307 Computerised National Identity Cards (CNICs). So far, 16,690,774 SIMs had been blocked by all operators as subscribers disowned them.
He said that the government had given the task to re-verify a total of 103 million SIMs under the NAP and after counting the verified SIMs and blocked SIMs so far, the number has touched 93 million SIMs. The remaining task is to re-verify the remaining The remaining task is to re-verify remaining 10 million SIMs in order to achieve the desired goal of 103 million SIMs but if the subscribers fail in doing so all unverified SIMs will be blocked with immediate effect after lapse of the deadline.
He said that there was need to appreciate that the regulator and operators had put in place biometric verification system much before the Army Public School (APS) incident at Peshawar so without wasting any time the exercise got momentum to re-verify all 103 million SIMs across Pakistan.
However, telecom expert Sohaib Sheikh said that around 11 million SIMs were blocked before and the basic reason was that nobody owned those SIMs. He expects that around 20 million SIMs will be blocked and these “to be blocked subscribers” fall in the category of 90 days active customers scattered all over Pakistan. Moreover, he said that around 20 to 30 percent customers out of these 20 million blocked SIMs will re activate their SIMs within the given time-frame through BVS.
